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Gummer buries list of poisoned land

By Fred Pearce

CONTAMINATED land in Britain is to remain out of mind as well as out of sight. Last week, the government finally buried its promise of four years ago to set up local public registers of land that had a history of “contaminative use”, such as old gasworks, railway marshalling yards and chemicals factories.

Environment secretary John Gummer has bowed to pressure from the property and insurance industries, which feared that public registers would blight land slated for redevelopment and leave insurers saddled with unquantifiable liabilities. In a written parliamentary answer, he announced the government’s decision to repeal the unimplemented section 143 of the 1990 Environmental Protection Act, which required ministers to set up the registers.

A new approach is to be adopted, said Gummer, which will avoid the public knowing where the contaminated land is. And it will limit the requirement on landowners and developers to clean up pollution, obliging them only to remove what Gummer called “real hazards”, which pose an immediate risk to health or the environment.

Local councils, eventually with the research backup of the new Environment Agency, will, he said, “have the task of identifying problems caused by contamination and establishing priorities for dealing with them”. This could sometimes force a cleanup. “In the light of this,” said Gummer, a public register was unnecessary.

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But this appears to contradict his department’s own consultation paper of May 1991, which said that “the main purpose of registers will be to alert local authorities, landowners and potential purchasers or developers to the possibility of contamination” and to “enable environmental health departments to identify potential threats to public health”.

The 1991 consultation paper, outlining the case for public registers, said&colon; “It is better for everyone concerned to be aware of possible contamination so that appropriate investigations can be carried out on a basis of knowledge” and that “the best response to public alarm is a policy of openness”. Gummer’s statement last week did not say why these priorities no longer apply.

Tens of thousands of plots of land in Britain, many now with houses and gardens on them, may be contaminated. British Gas alone has a register of more than 1000 former gasworks that may be heavily polluted. The company has always refused to make this register public.

The absence of a public register encourages periodic health scares on housing estates discovered to be on toxic land. In February, a doctor treating residents of an estate built on the site of the former Beckton gasworks in London’s docklands blamed an outbreak of migraines, skin rashes and diarrhoea on contaminated soil.

In September, consultants appointed by Friends of the Earth complained that garden soils on another former gasworks in Enfield, north London, were contaminated with cyanide, phenols and arsenic.

Liana Stupples of Friends of the Earth said&colon; “The government is looking to the attitude of British Gas as the test of the voluntary approach. But the company never says what it finds at its sites or what standards it applies to cleaning up.”